GRAND RAPIDS – Nancy Gazan remembers where she was and what she was doing 48 years ago Tuesday, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

“We lived in Grayling, my husband was working for the State of Michigan,” said Gazan, a Holland resident who attended a lecture about the Kennedys at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum Tuesday.

The Gazans were among 260 persons who attended the talk by Jason Duncan, an Aquinas College history professor, who discussed recently released transcripts of tapes that Jacqueline Kennedy made shortly after her husband's death.

“We were totally shocked,” said Gazan, who was the mother of a newborn son at the time. “We said this is the kind of thing that absolutely cannot happen in the United States in 1963.”

Gazan said they attended the lecture because their fascination with the Kennedys has never died.

“We were young ourselves and the Kennedys were young and we admired them,” she said.

In his hour-long talk, Duncan said the 34-year-old widow's interviews with family friend and historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. revealed little of the scandalous philandering and marital infidelity that surfaced about Kennedy later.

The seven interviews, which were to have been sealed for 50 years, were released by their daughter, Caroline, after several of her parents' contemporaries died in recent years, Duncan said.

“She was a young woman, 34 years old and the mother of two children,” Duncan said of the tapes. “Most importantly, she was a very private person.”

As a wife, “she was definitely a product of her time,” Duncan said. She saw her role as being supportive of her husband, making sure he came home to pleasant surroundings at the end of his work day.

She also was loyal to her husband, judging acquaintances by their support or lack of support for his career.

In one comment that could later be viewed as ironic, she told Schlesinger she did not respect or like civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. because of allegations that was unfaithful to his wife.

“She said JFK told her she should not judge him too harshly for his weaknesses of the flesh,” Duncan said.

Despite his infidelities, Kennedy was a religious person who diligently practiced his faith, Duncan said. Though he read voraciously, he was not an intellectual.